Making new TIL/KB articles easy to find: The "real reason" Apple does not want to do this

No surprise. Apple did not reply to our request to either provide a feature that allows tracking of new articles posted to the TIL/KB or explain why this is not possible.

Actually, as we posted last October, we suspect that the real reason behind Apple's reticence is that they do not want to make it easy to find newly posted articles. Indeed, we received information from a reliable source yesterday that supports this theory. It may even be that MacFixIt is partly to "blame" for Apple's policy change. Here is the deal (understanding that no one from Apple has officially confirmed this):

Apple feels obligated to post troubleshooting information to its web site. This makes sense. It allows Apple to say that the information is publicly available. And, if a user searches for a solution to a specific problem, they will likely find it. All well and good.

However, Apple does not welcome the publicity that sites such as MacFixIt give to these reports. Apple considers this to be "bad press," airing their dirty laundry so to speak. Also, reports of TIL/KB articles by MacFixIt tend to generate "false alarm" phones calls to Apple Support - calls from people who think they have the problem, but actually do not. Without this publicity, Apple believes it would get much less of these false alarms.

The result is that Apple is intentionally making it more difficult for web sites to get this information. It's a public relations matter, not a technical one. We were specifically told that MacFixIt "upset some important people at Apple last year" when we pointed out a new TIL about a "sensitive issue." As it turned out, the article had been posted before it was approved and was subsequently pulled. In the fallout from this incident, Apple "changed the whole approval process and one of the decrees was no more 'Recent articles' page."

Margin Notes: To be fair, Apple is not obligated to provide this feature - and most other major vendor web sites do not do so. But Apple is unique. It provides both the OS and the CPU hardware for every Mac. When it comes to providing troubleshooting info, it should do better.

An article in MacUser gives brief mention to this matter.